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My favorite things about ZFS:- Simpler volume management -- there's no more LVM layer! A little weird at first, but it really grows on you. Just zpool create, zfs create and you're off and running.- Huge volumes -- we have a couple in production near 800TB- Writable snapshots (think FlexClone on NetApp) -- no performance penalty. We have systems with hundreds of snaps and clones.- Really stable (in our experience, ZFS on *Solaris has been rock solid -- the management pieces on top is where we occasionally run into issues). ZoL has already been quite stable.- ZIL/L2ARC -- Use SSD's to accelerate reads/writes.- Performs great with minimal tuning, but there are plenty of hidden knobs if you need them.- Triple parity RAID options. Essential for larger drives.

Cons and Caveats:- Memory hungry. Really memory hungry. Fortunately, RAM is cheap these days.- Does require CPU as it wants to do all the "RAID" itself. Processors are so fast that this has never been an issue for us. Also you probably want to use disks that speak real SAS, not SATA to ensure graceful failure.- For the *Solaris versions, picking the right hardware tends to be important. ZoL opens a lot of doors here.- Deduplication sucks (or sucked last time we tried it). Required a ton of memory, especially if you want to use smaller block sizes to get better space savings. Very challenging to move away from deduplication once you turn it on.

Slashdot has become entirely too political. This isn't even close to being accurate and with all the shots the site takes at Fox News and such you'd think there'd be some pot calling ketlte black type self-awareness when throwing this sort of thing out there...

I'll miss the true technical stuff, but time to yank the site out of the ol RSS reader and find something better.

We are moving more and more to a culture where it isn't individuals who bear the consequences and take the responsibility for the risks they take, but governments (and to a lesser extent employers and other groups). This shift has come disguised as the offering of "free" services -- a way to take responsibiliy and stress off an individual's life and simplify some of the choices they make.

However, it is now up to whatever group has taken responsibilty for the risks to keep costs down. The individual is no longer as motivated to make correct choices on his or her own because they have no exposure to the true cost of those risks. So, the "group" (bureacracy?) will step in and make those decisions -- sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but in almost all cases undoubtedly leaving many unhappy.

It's not really surprising... this is how we've been voting as a country for years. This sort of thing will expand to where employers or even governments are mandating certain diet, exercise and mental health requirements before individuals may participate or take advantage of health or retirement benefits (for which there may be no legal alternative).

We've seen the things blamed on "Climate Change" shift from hotter temperatures, to *cooler temperatures* (as things cooled or didn't warm very much the last decade) to animals doing weird stuff we don't think they would normally do, etc., etc.

Next, weather disasters -- which have been a constant on this planet forever will now be blamed on climate change.

And guaranteed if there aren't as many weather disasters (since those are driven by an extremely complex system of which we only understand a tiny bit about) as there "should be" the depression of weather disasters will be blamed on climate change as well.

(Actually this happens with their yearly hurricane season predictions already).

The good part is that people are really wising up to this stuff. The bad part is the alarmists are still getting money.

Does this really reveal anything nefarious about anyone other than the clergy of the Church of Global Warming? It rightly *is* the goal of the skeptical community to combat the hysteria with both science and by exposing the lack of trustworthiness of those who would have us sink our hard earned money into this far from settled theory.

If anything, this has now backfired and truly exposed how the tide is turning in the AGW debate.

Amazing to me how many repliers are still referencing "RPM Hell". RPM Hell hasn't existed for a long time, and yum is speedy and makes installing software as easy as it is under Ubuntu. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't used Fedora in a long, long time. I also tend to think Fedora has better quality packages overall... they have some pretty strict guidelines for how things are packaged up and vetted before being added to the repository (another contributing factor that limits overall size IMO).

Ubuntu does have a larger software repository however -- and don't have as many qualms about including "non-free" software that often can be the key to making things "just work" (video drivers, wifi drivers, etc). Sure there are third party repos for Fedora that do the same, but a user would need to go find them and set them up. Not as integrated.

Fedora itself also tends to be a bit more bleeding edge. This attracts the developers, but might scare away the average joe user who doesn't want to deal with quite as much churn between releases (although Fedora does a great job of QA'ing!).

CentOS does a good job of releasing updates fairly quickly, though not necessarily between point releases. Especially if point releases occur when a point release for multiple versions of RHEL is released simultaneously. You can be stuck in a lurch for quite a while while CentOS's small team works hard to get things going.

As to getting bug fixes... this has primarily been helpful at my company as we write software that runs on RHEL and occasionally need to ensure bugs in RHEL provided software are fixed in a timely manner. It's nice to be able to escalate a BZ entry via an SR and a TAM or account rep.

Tech support you may or may not need. Perhaps if you're the only Linux "expert" or if you want that extra assurance or a vendor to "blame" if something goes south.